Fall 2012

You Only Die Once: Why Brain Death is Not the Death of a Human Being; A Reply to Nicholas Tonti-Filippini

For Tonti-Filippini, then, the mainstream account of brain death is a godsend to loyal Catholic bioethicists, a weapon against mentalism that is at once empirically unassailable and philosophically-theologically orthodox. By the same token, he considers my theoretical and empirical challenge to mainstream thinking about brain death to be unsound scientifically and out of keeping with Church teaching, which in Tonti-Filippini’s view is committed to the proposition that total irreversible loss of brain function is (a sure sign of) the death of a human being.

For Tonti-Filippini, then, the mainstream account of brain death is a godsend to loyal Catholic bioethicists, a weapon against mentalism that is at once empirically unassailable and philosophically-theologically orthodox. By the same token, he considers my theoretical and empirical challenge to mainstream thinking about brain death to be unsound scientifically and out of keeping with Church teaching, which in Tonti-Filippini’s view is committed to the proposition that total irreversible loss of brain function is (a sure sign of) the death of a human being.

In what follows, I will argue that Tonti-Filippini’s critique of my position is wrong on both counts: Neither the empirical evidence nor Church teaching requires us to hold that the brain is “essential” for organismic somatic integration, or that the brain’s death is automatically the death of a human being. My aim, however, is not simply to refute Tonti-Filippini’s charges against me, but also to show that the integrationist account of brain death is not at all the empirically sound, theologically-philosophically orthodox godsend that he asserts.

In the next section of the paper (II. Brain Death: Sharpening the Question), I propose to work out a philosophical framework for understanding somatic integration and the role the brain plays in it. The following section (III. A Bold Assertion) will then apply this framework to the available empirical evidence, all of which suggests that the integration accomplished by the brain, rather than constituting the human organism, only maintains its health or promotes its survival. Having presented my case against the somatic integration rationale for the brain death criterion, I will conclude (IV. Conclusion: What Does the Church Really Teach?) by rebutting Tonti-Filippini’s charge that my position deviates from Catholic orthodoxy, which does not in fact declare brain death to be death, end of story. Tonti-Filippini’s attempt to wrap himself in the mantle of Catholic doctrine reveals more about his own flawed hermeneutic of the Magisterium than it does about the actual substance of the magisterial statements he invokes.

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